Tag Archives: New York City Council

The Shoulder-to-Shoulder Campaign, an interfaith coalition allied with the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), is praising the passage of two bills by the New York City Council aimed at stopping the alleged abuses of the NYPD. Mayor Bloomberg says he will veto the bills, even though they passed with enough support to override it.

The passed bills, the End Discriminatory Profiling Bill and NYPD Oversight Bill, outraged Mayor Bloomberg and NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. The latter bill requires the overseeing of the NYPD by an independent Inspector-General. The former opens the door for the NYPD to be sued in state court for policies that disproportionately affect certain ages, genders, sexual orientations or housing statuses.

Mayor Bloomberg considers the bills to be a matter of “life and death” vows to “not give up for one minute.”

“The bill would allow virtually everyone in New York City to sue the Police Department and individual police officers over the entire range of law enforcement functions they perform,” Kelly explained.

He said the result will be skyrocketing liability costs, the unnecessary use of resources and an overall decrease in effectiveness.

When asked about the so-called problem of NYPD racial profiling, Bloomberg dismissively said, “Nobody racially profiles.” He made perhaps the most politically-incorrect statement of his career in defense of the NYPD:

“…They just keep saying, ‘Oh it’s a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group.’ That may be, but it’s not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the murder. In that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.”

Bloomberg refuses to apologize. “The numbers clearly show that the stops are generally proportionate with suspect’s descriptions,” he said.

The board president of the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Zead Ramadan, has announced his candidacy for District 7 City Council and has already raised $47,000. He is a Palestinian that was born in Kuwait but came to the U.S. as a child. In December 2011, he refused to answer a question about whether he’d condemn Hamas.

In May 2012, Ramadan appeared on Iran’s state-controlled PressTV and said “the comments that are being made against [American] Muslims are very eerily echoing the comments that were being made against Jews by Nazis.” Another quote shed some light on why the Iranian regime booked him:

“[W]henever you think that America, the land of the free, is going to grow up and go beyond it [racism], more intolerant, extremist voices come out.”

CAIR was labeled an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism-financing trial in U.S. history in 2007. The government listed CAIR among entities that “who and/or were members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee and/or its organizations.” The Palestine Committee was a secret Brotherhood group set up to support Hamas. In 2009, a federal judge upheld the labeling of CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator because of “ample” evidence tying it to Hamas.

In a 2007 court filing in the case of convicted terrorist Sabri Bekhala, federal prosecutors state: “From its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists…the conspirators agreed to use deception to conceal from the American public their connections to terrorists.”

CAIR was founded by members of the pro-Hamas Islamic Association for Palestine. A 1991 U.S. Muslim Brotherhood memo identifies IAP as one of “our organizations and the organizations of our friends.” The memo explicitly states that its “work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”

Ramadan served alongside Cyrus McGoldrick, the CAIR-NY leader, who left the organization on January 7. As we reported in December, McGoldrick sent out a flurry pro-Hamas tweets during the latest round of fighting with Israel. But not a word of condemnation was heard by Ramadan.